Afterward, Hounschell struggled from the debris, teetering in her black
dress and high heels. Emerging from the basement, she could see the high
school three blocks away, down the hill behind her house. That was new.
Every structure, every leaf on every tree that had obscured the view was
gone.

All around, there were voices calling for help and other dazed survivors
creeping from belowground or picking their way through the ruins from
closets and bathrooms. The smell from ruptured gas mains was overpowering. A
house thundered into flames. Would-be rescuers dodged utility lines to reach
loved ones. Jim Winters  Joe's dad  paused on his way to
Hounschell's house to help a group of men lift a wall to free a trapped
victim. Too late. The man bled to death before their eyes. "His skin just
went white," Winters said. "I've watched a lot of horror movies, but ..."
(See how you can help tornado victims.)

Two blocks east, Regina Lane ducked under the steel bar that had narrowly
missed piercing her head and blinked her eyes in disbelief. Her daughter
Rachel Long  a voice on the cell phone moments before the storm hit,
saying, "Mama, take care! I love you! I love you!"  was now running
toward her with bare feet and a look of unfathomable relief.

The prospect of cleaning up Joplin seemed unimaginable, even as the hours
turned into days. Perhaps a third of this city of 50,000 residents was
damaged or destroyed, leaving a mess almost impossible to comprehend. An
EF-5 tornado pens a signature that makes no sense. You stare and ponder
until slowly it comes into focus: that's an upside-down, half-buried piano;
a garage-door spring; the colored gravel from a fish tank; a car bumper
entwined in a brass bed; a flat-screen TV with a door molding straight
through it; the little man from the top of a soccer trophy; a Barbie shoe.
Clean up suggests a return to an orderly past. In the coming weeks
and months, Joplin will have to scrape bare a blasted hole in its heart.

And yet as people crept through the jumble, filling boxes almost at random
with soggy clothing, ruined electronics, rescued photographs and woeful
fragments of children's toys, what was most striking were the persistent
expressions of gratitude. There was Aggie Elbert, who salvaged little more
than an old clock and a broken statue of the Madonna and Child, murmuring,
"God was good to us." Regina Lane, saying, "I don't know how we made it out,
because so many perished. We're so fortunate." Ed Boyd, looking tearfully at
the little closet under the staircase in the middle of his vanished home,
declaring, "Those stairs saved our lives."
(See a video of the twisters in the South.)

There was a lot of talk the day before the storm about whether the world
would end. An old preacher in California had declared that time was running
out and bought ads in major newspapers and on billboards to spread the news.
The Joplin storm was a summons back to reality, a reminder that a world can
end at any moment even as new worlds begin. Five patients died when the
storm hit St. John's hospital; the same day, four babies were born at
Freeman hospital across the street.

Pamela Merriman, now just two days shy of 28, had a sense of this as she
looked -into the tiny triangle of space that had held her and her two
children after the roof dropped and the walls tumbled and the bathroom was
shoved into the living room under the garage door. Imagine a doghouse, then
go a little smaller. "I feel really good that I was able to protect my
children," she said.

She surveyed her former possessions, the stuff of a world now lost. "I'd be
happy with just walking away from all of this," she concluded. "Dump it all
and just start over. Happy birthday  I'm alive."